Background: Transactive communication means referring to and building on a learning partner's idea, by, for example, extending the partner's idea or interlinking the partner's idea with an idea of one's own. This transforms the partner's idea into a more elaborate one. Previous research found a positive relationship between students' transactive…

Predicting the success or failure of a student in a course or program is a problem that has recently been addressed using data mining techniques. In this paper we evaluate some of the most popular classification and regression algorithms on this problem. We address two problems: prediction of approval/failure and prediction of grade. The former is…

This paper explores the ways students perceive the transfer of learned knowledge to new situations -- often a surprisingly difficult prospect. The novel aspect compared to the traditional transfer studies is that the learning phase is not a part of the experiment itself. The intention was only to activate acquired knowledge relevant to the…

Recent research has shown that, in a university context, mastery goals are highly valued and that students may endorse these goals either because they believe in their utility (i.e., social utility), in which case mastery goals are positively linked to achievement, or to create a positive image of themselves (i.e., social desirability), in which…

How can art function as a medium through which to re(view) the self and others? This article explores this central question through an interdisciplinary classroom experiment that brought theories of identity development in a multiculturalism classroom together with principles of portraiture present in an introductory drawing class. Interview…

Sociologists have long recognized the utility of modified forms of Monopoly as tools for teaching about social stratification within the United States. We present an adaptation of Monopoly to help instructors teach students how capitalism plays out in a liberalizing world economy. By taking on roles as CEOs of global companies based in different…

An important purpose of reading literature is to move beyond the literal text to construct an interpretation of what the text conveys about the human condition and nature of the world. In two experiments, college students with no prior training in literary analysis read a short story and responded to one of four task instructions (plot, ambiguous,…

When they arrive at community colleges or open-enrollment universities, most students take placement exams in English and mathematics to determine whether they are ready for college-level courses. Students with low scores are referred to developmental--remedial--courses. Forty percent of all entering college students and over half of entering…

Taiwanese vocational schools are actively promoting opportunities for students to obtain specialized certificates during their formal education. However, because segments of the student population do not intend to achieve certification, questions about how to increase the motivation of students to pursue this goal have arisen. Two experiments…

In this study, we provide STR-texts to non-native English speaking students during English lectures to facilitate learning, attention, and meditation. We carry out an experiment to test the feasibility of our approach. Our results show that the participants in the experimental group both outperform those in the control group on the post-tests and…

This study used a randomized controlled trial to determine whether students, assessed by their community colleges as needing an elementary algebra (remedial) mathematics course, could instead succeed at least as well in a college-level, credit-bearing introductory statistics course with extra support (a weekly workshop). Researchers randomly…

Understanding an arithmetic operation implies, at minimum, knowing the direction of effects that the operation produces. However, many children and adults, even those who execute arithmetic procedures correctly, may lack this knowledge on some operations and types of numbers. To test this hypothesis, we presented preservice teachers (Study 1),…

It is a challenge for business students or even employees to understand business processes and enterprise software usage without involvement in real-world practices. Many business schools are using ERP software in their curriculum, aiming to expose students to real-world business practices. ERPsim is an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)…

The traditional JAVA course examination is just a list of questions from which we cannot know students' skills of programming. According to the eight abilities in curriculum objectives, we designed an assessment standard of JAVA programming course that is based on employment orientation and apply it to practical teaching to check the teaching…

The present study investigated second language (L2) learners' acquisition of automatic word recognition and the development of L2 orthographic representation in the mental lexicon. Participants in the study were Japanese university students enrolled in a compulsory course involving a weekly 30-minute sustained silent reading (SSR) activity with…